And since we can never really get the allegory out of animals, how could they be where they shouldn’t? Even if we suppose that some creature belongs in a prairie or jungle, these ideas are produced by discourse. Our ideas of belonging are constructed ones. This artificiality organises, indeed, the very flesh of the animals’ body. Richon’s rhinoceros, for example, looks too much like a model for us not to question its reality as a living creature. And when animals inhabit art, the very fact of interpreting the picture gives them a place: we have no choice but to accept that in art, animals can never be out-of-place. But what can be out-of-place is perhaps less the animal, than the viewer him or herself, as Richon’s work suggests.

Take the case of the two geese. One might take this picture first as an encomium to togetherness. Framed in a pose that evokes postcard affection, their whiteness contrasts the grim and dirty alley. Wherever they are, they have each other. As we look closer, however, we see that they are missing each other. Each has its gaze directed at an angle oblique to the other, and their bodies fail to coincide. Togetherness becomes separateness. Although their form evokes symmetry, their attention is focused beyond the partner.

While the walls of the surrounding buildings slide towards their vanishing point, pulling our own gaze with them, the geese stare sideways. The formal composition of this piece refers strongly to the laws of perspective, laws which work to position the viewer, to unify space and to organise our gaze. The walls, in fact, seem to materialise perspective lines, and the colour contrasts in the image guide our eye to a focal point. But the geese aren’t too interested in all this, as if our ways of directing the eye had no purchase for them. And as viewers, their contemplation of a brick wall removes the vanity from our own acts of seeing.

The pigs gaze at something (or nothing) that is obscure to us. They look neither at us, the camera, nor at their means of exit, the door, but sideways, like the two geese and most of the animals at large in the countryside shots. The goat also looks sideways in an image that evokes Buridan’s ass, caught forever between two piles of hay, unable to decide which one it should feed from.

It is hard not to suppose a parody here of the conceit of the viewer of art, the animals at home in an art college and busy in the act of looking, an act which we assume to be either pointless or the result of perplexity or ignorance. Richon’s title Allegories, thus shifts to target the viewer of art, rather than the virtues or vices we might more immediately associate with the animals he has gathered. He shows us, perhaps, how an out-of-place animal can generate a more out-of-place viewer.

This is an edited extract from: ‘Allegories’ by Olivier Richon (editions de l’Aquarium agnostique, 2000).